Bangalore, February 15: The Indian Space Research Organization has blamed its own tight four-year schedule set in 2004 for a delay in the launch of the country’s first moon mission. The Chandrayaan-1 launch target date was April 9, 2008.

ISRO’s moon mission director M Annadurai has officially acknowledged a two-to-three-month push back of the April 9 scheduled date.

“A launch date after the Feb 29, 2008 eclipse was the target in 2004. I don’t want to point out any single issue as the reason for pushing the launch date. If at all there is any reason, then it is my own ambitious schedule set in 2004”, the moon mission director stated.

Though most systems for Chandrayaan-1 — instruments, ground station, mission plan, post-launch data utilization and science plan — are either in hand or in the final phase of testing, ISRO would like to tread cautiously, Annadurai said.

“I assure you we are not very much off the target. But just to keep the launch target, we don’t want to overlook any issue that will compromise the unqualified success of the mission”, he has stated.

The new official launch date will possibly be announced by the end of this month.

“Any system of this volume will have its own issues that need to be solved before proceeding to the next step. The issue gets compounded with many organizations involved and tends to stagger the schedule”, Annadurai said.

The Chandrayaan-I project director had stated late last year that the project was on schedule for realising an April launch date, and that a Chandrayaan-2 project report had also been prepared in a record time and approved by the Space Commission and the cabinet.

Just ahead of the New Year he had however urged his team members that they would have to stretch themselves through January and February 2008 to ensure early shipment of the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft to the Sriharikota launch complex.

Objectives

• Carry out high-resolution mineralogical and chemical imaging of permanently shadowed north and south polar regions

• Search for surface or sub-surface water-ice on the moon, specially at lunar pole

• The new set of data would help in unraveling mysteries about the origin and evolution of solar system in general and that of the moon in particular.